Joan Baez speaks!
The contemporary folk icon and Dylan cohort plays Atlanta Botanical Garden
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Since the late 1950s, Joan Baez’s stunning voice has channeled a lifetime of righteousness and tradition. From her early days singing old-school folk numbers through her socially conscious songs of the ‘60s and her country leanings in the ‘70s, the one-time Dylan cohort is a beacon from a time when artists really could change the world. Tonight (Fri., July 30), Baez performs the songs that made her famous and some newer ones as well, proving that after 50 years, she’s still going strong. $36.50. 8 p.m. Atlanta Botanical Garden, 1345 Piedmont Ave. 404-876-5859.
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Chad Radford: From the beginning you’ve done a good job of taking other people’s songs and making them your own, and you’ve also stayed current with the material that you sing. Are there other contemporary song writers that you like listening to either at home or on-stage?
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Joan Baez: Not very conscientiously. I don’t spend much time trying to find other songwriters. When the time comes to make another album, I’ll keep an ear out, but I usually do it through other people. When I’m at home I listen to opera, which is kind of ironic…
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When I started singing there was just a massive pool of songs out there. They were folk songs and they were ballads and that’s how I entered it. I didn’t have to search for anything because it was just there, right there in Harvard Square and in New York. There weren’t any contemporary folk singers at the time — it probably started with Tim Hardin in New York City and that’s when other people started to write, and that’s when I started copping the songs. Really, I didn’t start writing for 10 years after I started, and of course the master was Dylan. I had access to his material but I never went out looking for it. Now I have to sing other people’s music because I haven’t been writing for the last 15 or 20 years.
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I’ll hear people say ‘recently you’ve been playing a lot of other people’s songs…’ Like it’s a new trend! Kind of like how I cut my hair laughs. People still say that, too. ‘Oh look, you cut your hair!’ Yoohoo…
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Do you still think of yourself as a folk singer?
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Some places in the world call it country and western, because they don’t know what else to call it. They don’t have folk music there. France doesn’t really have folk music. These days I guess I would call it contemporary folk, because it is contemporary. Also folk music is kind of antiquated, but it doesn’t bother me because there isn’t really anything else that describes it?